A few days ago the hard drive on my PC was not being recognized by the PC. We were able to connect it to my son’s PC (powered up by my PC power supply) and the hard drive would be visible often, but I never could actually get data/files transferred off of it. I could see the file structure to some extent, but when I tried to move folders the drive would not longer be seen by my son’s PC.
The drive seemed rather warm. running a fan on it kept it cool to the touch. This seemed consistent with my son’t PC power supply not being able to power up both hard drives and whatever other HW he has in there. I suppose the failure is causing the drive to draw more power than normal. The disc seems to be spinning, and every couple seconds it does something that one can feel when holding the drive, and is barely audible.
I tried running a fan on it and running chkdsk e:/f for a few days, and it was progressing, but very slowly. It got turned off earlier today or last night by someone, anyway it may have taken weeks or months to finish, if it would have ever finished.
We also tried some data recovery software, but after waiting 40 minutes for the SW to look at the drive, the SW did not manage to find any individual files or folders.
I am guessing the only way to get the data is to send the drive to someone and pony up some $, but I thought I would see if folks here have any further recommendations.
Æons ago, back in the Mesozoic Era or so, I had a 40meg(!!) drive crap the bed, but I really really needed some irreplaceable files off that.
Sent it to OnTrack, and for about 1kbuk (yeah, I needed those few files that badly), they pulled off the majority of the files and stuffed them onto (boxes of) diskettes.
They physically pull out the platters and read them in their own gizmo if they have to. Works if the electronics on the drive go teats-up.
Dunno about now, but back then, they had the rep that if they couldn’t pull off the data, no one else could. And were priced accordingly, I imagine.
Oh yeah, and now you know why all my important goodies, I pull off the peecee drives and onto external disks (plural). And even not-so-important goodies.
If I have to wipe the whole drive clean, I could do it without losing anything of value.
I have had a similar issue years ago with windows having no hope, i ended up making a usb bootable version of linux “Kali Linux” and it read the files that could be read without the locking up part, recovered most of my files, good luck with whatever you try.
I’ve had systems where the power supply cannot support all the attached hardware when too much is added. As already suggested, I would get a USB stick and put on a bootable version of an OS (Puppy Linux is small and quick, but I also use Linux Mint Mate this way too). Don’t worry about it being Linux, it will usually give you a graphical file manager so you can try and grab files from the dodgy HD using the standard point and click with a mouse. If that does not work, maybe you have a friend or work colleague who is ‘into computers’ who could have a look. Else, there are professional services who can take it up a few levels and recover the data or files. Good luck, and I hope you get back the data you need. Remember, when it come to data …. one is none, and two is one…. so make backups of vital files, to cloud or external HD or USB stick.
I know it’s too late now, but never, ever run chkdsk against a drive that you suspect has hardware problems. I wouldn’t use the /f option on a disk with (soft) filesystem corruption either, not if you really care about the data on it because it will just make it that much harder to use file recovery software.
The first thing to do with a drive that may be failing is to get a bigger drive and use something like ‘ddrescue’ to try and copy the whole disk to another disk, then work with the disk image. Ddrescue, and similar software, minimizes disk access and head movement. It goes through and reads the disk from top to bottom. It reads large chunks first. If there is an error, it makes a note, then reads the next big chunk. Once it goes through the whole disk, it spits the chunks it had trouble reading and tries each smaller chunk, again noting chunks it can’t read. It repeats until all it has left is the smallest possible chunks, then it retries each of them multiple times until it either gets a good read, or reaches a limit.
It’s been a while since I had to use it, but if I remember correctly, out of an entire 100+ GB disk, it was able to read all but a couple megabytes.
Like I said, ideally, you try this ASAP, but I think it’s still worth a try.
Once the disk is imaged, you work with the image, or a copy. I usually mount it as a disk in read only mode, and try and copy files normally. If that doesn’t work, you can also run disk recovery software against the image.
Did you take out the HDD from your sons pc and put it into your pc, but still could not read it? Run CrystalDiskInfo to see HDD health status.
There may be warnings about disk failure when booting the computer, then you should save the data asap, and get a new one.
Macrium Reflect free USB Rescue Media saved me some times. If the screen goes black and it wont boot at all, everything stalls, you can boot from that rescue Usb and choose fix Windows Boot Problems.
I have heard of putting a drive in the fridge, cool it way down, put on a machine and as fast as possible get the data off…once it gets too hot, it gets the “click o’ death”
as others have said…never try to fix errors on a drive that is failing in that fashion.
Thanks for the tips. I was not sure if I could still make a usb with boot files work or not, I will give that a try first. I have tried on SW avenue already, so my confidence is lower there, but I may try another or two of those suggested as well.
As far as chkdsk goes, I have used that successfully in the past when I had a different problem with a hard drive, so that was one of my early go to efforts. perhaps in error, we will see.
I recommend backing your data up on external drives and in the cloud. I know it’s probably too late for you now, but I would think about in the future.
That’s what I did with a friend’s laptop. Only needed a single directory-tree of pix, and I managed to get most of them, albeit slowly. Everything else was expendable.
The cloud is always a great idea since any backups stored in the same location as the PC are both likely to be taken out at the same time in the event of a fire, etc. I use Google Drive for my cloud backups but I always zip and encrypt the files I store there. Since disk drives are cheap now I also clone my hard drives periodically and physically store them elsewhere.
If you are really desperate, you can give these guys a try. I did, but unfortunately my drive (actually my friends drive) was too far gone. All it cost me was shipping to them. They sent it back.
Everything I backup on google drive is via a Mac encrypted image. I trust Google as far as I can throw them. Other than that, I use Carbon Copy to back everything up on external drives once a week.
